Sonnet 138: Liars In Love, or Lovers in Lies?

In any relationship of any degree of intimacy, we encounter the other in ways we have not yet—and perhaps could never—fully perceive. This observation leads us to consider not only the moral question of how we are affecting the lives of those closest to us, but also the epistemological question of just how little we know about each other and our shared life. In this essay, I’ll examine whether Shakespeare’s Sonnet 138 portrays lovers primarily as liars who knowingly deceive one another, or rather as lovers helplessly benighted. Put differently: does the sonnet depict lovers desperately clinging to an impossibly perfect image they lie to maintain—or are they simply, desperately clinging?

To explore this, I’ll consider two interpretive paths through Sonnet 138: first, an epistemological reading that emphasizes the lovers’ ignorance and illusion; second, a moral one that highlights deliberate deception and mutual complicity. Then I’ll propose a third possibility, which may synthesize both.

We begin with the question of what the lovers know. The poet says, “though I know she lies,” and later refers to a “simple truth suppressed.” Yet the sonnet as a whole leaves me wondering how the speaker could be certain that his beloved lies. And what exactly is the “simple truth”? Is it merely their aging, as is often supposed? It’s not so clear. Shakespeare strips these lovers bare—not just physically, but existentially—to reveal a more fundamental gap in knowability. He doesn’t merely frame this as a matter of clear-cut honesty or deceit, but as a distortion of truth itself in the name of love.

Consider the full line: “Though I know she lies, I do believe her.” If this is not a contradiction, it may reveal the very gap I’ve been pointing to—a hidden, ungovernable influence at work on both hearts and minds. The lover believes, but all he has to believe is a lie. And so, beneath their polite half-truths, something deeper is happening: the lovers are not merely deceiving each other; they are also being formed—entombed, even—within the illusions they sustain together.

Now to the ethical question. Perhaps Shakespeare casts the scenario in such morally loaded terms—calling the lovers “liars”—because, though they may be “untutor’d in the world’s false subtleties,” they are still culpably entangled in the stories they choose to inhabit. They are not merely naïve; they are complicit. Shakespeare writes, “in our faults by lies we flattered be”—a line that suggests the lovers’ falsehoods are not incidental but mutually sustaining fantasies. What matters more than what they know is what they’re willing to pretend not to know. Their ignorance isn’t innocent—it’s cultivated.

Here, we begin to see how the ethical and epistemological readings overlap and blur into each other. Shakespeare claims that “love’s best habit is in seeming trust.” The word habit emphasizes repetition and ritual: a daily costume, a second skin. Trust, then, is no longer something felt; it is performed. This alone might shift the weight back toward the epistemological: if love is clothed in “seeming trust,” then love itself may require illusion—a kind of cultivated not-knowing. The ethical question—whether one is “lying” or not—is absorbed into a more tragic one: lovers must appear to trust in order to keep love alive. Their entanglement is deception, yes, but it is also an agreement to preserve something beautiful by refusing to look too closely.

In this way, they are not just liars, but lovers caught in lies. This reading is supported by the poet’s admission of vanity—“vainly thinking that she thinks me young”—which reveals not only the depth of his illusion, but the tenderness with which he protects it. Intimacy, we are reminded, often requires such gentle illusions.

Still, the moral weight of their choices cannot be dismissed. Several lines suggest a knowing participation in the deception: “Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue,” and “on both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.” The lovers don’t suppress truth because they can’t see it—but because they prefer the comfort of the lie. There is something willful in their evasion—a shared refusal to confront the aging, the vulnerability, the impermanence that truth would reveal. If so, they are not just victims of illusion; they are agents of it. The deception is moral as well as existential: they really are liars, not just people caught in lies.

I mentioned a third interpretive path, and it is this: perhaps Shakespeare’s “love” is not a woman, but the love within his own heart. I admit this may be an idiosyncratic reading, but it echoes many of the same truths. That inward “love” speaks lies to him—promising youth, reciprocity, durability. And yet he chooses to believe it, knowing its limits. Here, the lie is not interpersonal but intrapersonal: the poet is both lover and beloved, liar and believer. This inward reading invites us to reframe our original question. Perhaps Sonnet 138 is not about liars in love or lovers caught in lies, but about the illusions that originate within us, shaping all outward expressions of intimacy.

Ultimately, whatever Shakespeare’s original intent, Sonnet 138 explores a paradox that love alone cannot resolve. Whether lovers are trapped in illusion or complicit in it, the poem suggests that intimacy depends not on absolute truth but on a trembling acceptance of mystery. Love, Shakespeare hints, always dances around the unknown—where lies and truths blend, each softening the other’s edge, making intimacy both impossible without illusions and profound because of them.